The Ha Ha Club

Flipping channels this morning (did I seem to say somewhere recently that TV watching is bad? Well, you know, I didn’t really mean *bad*; I was just observing – after all, who am I to say?) and I come across something on one of the high-numbered channels – Discovery Health, or something like that – about the Ha Ha Club. Some sort of certified (which meaning of "certified" is appropriate here?) laugh leader is doing something funny (or at least, everyone has agreed to find it highly amusing) with a bunch of senior citizens, all old ladies actually, and they’re giddily waving back and forth and yukking it up with gusto. Some sort of slickly produced combination of voice-over narration and the laugh lady herself are telling me that laughter is the best medicine, and science has recently discovered blah blah blah, and so on.

But I’m sitting here thinking Christ Almighty, keep your stupid theories to yourself, you old bat, and stop trying to fill people’s lives with what’s good for them. Why, if you suck any more meaning out of modern existence, we might as well just put our clones on autopilot so they can do whatever the hell makes sense, and then we’ll go off over here and have a good time doing things that aren’t good ideas…

Now of course I don’t really mean that exactly, the way it sounds anyway. People always think many things at once; the mean old killjoy in my head was only one of those voices. This was the voice of my grandfather, who didn’t want anyone faking up his life. Laugh when there’s something funny, not when someone wants you to laugh. Friends are sacred; one takes them where one finds them; friendship is earned over many years, as one plumbs the depth of someone’s soul – perhaps without a word exchanged. Don’t demean yourself, or the glory of God’s universe, or the meaning of your relationship to those around you, by playing the fool, by following the leader, by pretending.

The voice of my grandmother is in the other ear; singing and laughing, harmonizing to the music. No standing on ceremony for her; no holding herself out as too good for something. She had a certain reserve, a certain self-respect too, but she made friends easily; she was happy; she never thought her own opinions were worth all that much. No need for any philosophy – although she respected education – she just treated people right. She’d be the first to join the Haha Club; she’d be the first to enjoy the laughter – her grandmotherly, sweet musical laughter echoing her gentle soul. She’d tell my grandfather to stop being grumpy; to let loose once in awhile; to stop thinking he was better than everyone else. She’d dance and talk, and get tired, enjoy a good sit-down meal and talk afterwards, and off to an early sleep.

Now at another moment, later in the day, sitting at my home-office desk, tapping away – and something about Aretha Franklin’s life is on the tube, over on my right (what a complete hypocrite I must be – I love all that I hear and learn on TV, and there’s nothing more conducive to work than a boring program in the background, and nothing more relaxing than an old sitcom one has seen countless times already). My daughter is at her own computer a few feet away to the left, and glances up now and then at the TV – she’s always liked Aretha, ever since she and some best friends did a rendition of “Respect” at some elementary school talent show. And on the show, they’re saying something about how at one point, Aretha heard that her father had been suddenly and unexpectedly killed. Baby looks up at that, and I see her glance at me out of the corner of her eye. It strikes me that *I* am her father – that she’s imagining what it would be like to hear that someday about *me*. It’s a funny feeling – which one has in various ways many times – to be reminded that to her, I am not who I am to me. My earlier life – what I experience as most of my life – is a blur to her; my existence in any form except as her father is not really real. I am her daddy; a mysterious, stylized being. It reminds me again of how mysterious and opaque my own father is – although that’s more him than anything else :-) Not to mention my mother, my now-gone-forever grandparents, and even my brothers and sisters, who all grew up separately, in a rather ridiculous family diaspora.

So, about the Ha Ha Club. I’m more the shy type. The type whose feelings are private; who does not wish to have those feelings trivialized or led. I don’t like sentimental movies – Lifetime-style emotional manipulation bugs me. I don’t like psychiatry – even when a perceptive psychiatrist is accurate, which I think is very rare, I think it is harmful to cede the process of learning about oneself to some one else, even in partnership. Talks with friends are totally fine, even random strangers (this tactic can work very well), but not with self-styled experts who will shortcut your personal growth for you. Don’t even get me started about anti-depressive drugs and other blunt instruments to improve one’s very soul. I could never join Amway, because I am incapable of standing there like an idiot, shouting how great something is that I don’t really believe in. Now I *can* join in gospel hymn singing, or doe-see-doe my way through an embarrassing square dance lesson with some ad hoc collection of strangers, or laugh like a maniac at some comedian – but I can’t have a prescribed feeling – like some laugh leader would want me to. I would find whatever it was unfunny just because of the forced situation.

But fortunately for me, I have a wife who *would* laugh – and her high-pitched, trilling laughter would make me laugh. And she wouldn’t care a bit about my stupid resistance, and soon, I would forget it too, if she were there.

I’ll lose that when she passes away, and I’ll be one of those old men who find that life is very hard, and not fun, without their life companion. Even with my daughter, and the grandchildren, and the friends, and the dog, I will be incomplete. I’ll talk to my absent wife – who annoys me no end in regular life; I’ll anticipate in my dotage whatever ghostly companionship my weak little brain imagines we would have when I joined her after life. I will hear her voice too, and live in a world that perplexes those around me, and I’ll be difficult and frustrating to deal with, because no one can fill the void. Although I’m sure the grandchildren will revive my good humor. But not the laugh lady.